My First Week! 9/13/23






 Hey all! P-days (preparation days) are Wednesdays for me in the MTC, so my emails will be sent out then, I can also reply to emails sent to me until 6 o clock today. 


So far it's been a lot of zoom and online work, for those of you who don't know, the Missionary Training Center standard is to send missionaries to their in person MTC after a week of at-home learning via zoom. My assumption for them doing this is to help us new missionaries get adjusted to the new life of devoted study to Jesus Christ 24/7 before we're sent out to the real thing. Either way, it's a lot of zoom calls. 

If any of you know me well I am not a huge fan of online meetings since my entire Junior year of high school was comprised almost solely of them. So going into this I wasn't the most excited. I prayed a lot during the first day that I could be more excited about being on zoom all day and trying to have a companion who lives across the state. As always, God answered my prayers, and I have since come to terms with the reality of the next week of online stuff (this doesn't mean I'm not ready to go to the real MTC). God works in cool ways, when I say I've come more to terms with it, I mean that yesterday my district and I set up a zoom meeting to talk about a devotional we all were supposed to watch, and it ended up being a big testimony meeting that I could tell had impacted us all. I started by bearing my testimony of the Book of Mormon and it's divine truth and a few other Elders followed suit until we were all practically shivering with the spirit even though we were in completely different places! The Spirit is so cool! It was super cool and super awakening to see how the Spirit can work with all of us at the same time. I learned the true power of bearing testimony of something you know to be true, first lesson in the mission, check. And what a blessing it was.

I don't want to jump the gun too early by saying this whole online stuff and being a missionary is all sunshine and rainbows, but I do know that it is a great blessing to be called by the Lord to preach his gospel, regardless if the circumstances change to be less enjoyable than they are now. Anyway, I just wanted to start it off right! I don't have too much to say, seeing as I'm only about 60 hours into being a missionary, but more will come! Look out Provo MTC and Tuxtla Gutierrez Mexico!

Wish you all the best, thanks for reading it all if you got this far.

- Elder Allen


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